USA > Ohio > Wayne County > History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I > Part 14
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Friday, March 27, 1829, a year or so after the burning of the old court . house, a special session of the county commissioners was held, the commis- sioners then being Stephen Coe, Jacob Ihrig and Abram Ecker, who met for the purpose of making some provisions for the erection of public build- ings. It was resolved by the board "to erect on the northwest corner of the public square, in the town of Wooster, four substantial fire-proof offices of such dimensions as may hereafter be agreed upon." The auditor of the county was authorized to "give notice by advertisement in the Republican- Advocate and by getting hand-bills struck and circulated."
April 24th, the same year, the commissioners met in the public square of Wooster, between ten and four o'clock and offered the contract at public
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auction, Daniel Miller appearing as the lowest bidder ; but the commissioners, upon consultation, concluded that he was not a suitable person to award the contract to and adjourned the session until the next morning, when the contract was let to Calvin Hobart. The buildings were of brick and stone; were seventy-two and a half feet in length, with walls eight and a half feet high between the foundation and the commencement of the arches. The contractor obligated himself to have the building completed by December 1, 1829, and for such work he was to receive the sum of nine hundred eighty- nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. The brick from the walls of the old court house (burned in 1828) were appropriated in these buildings.
This office building served well the purpose for which it had been con- structed until the close of the Civil war, when more and better office accom- modations were demanded by the prosperous, growing county. The "new" county building, that accommodates the present offices of the county, stands adjoining to the court house proper, to the west on Market street. The structure is built of stone, brick and iron, solidly and massively constructed, and is ample in room and appliances for the present needs of the county. The first floor is devoted to the offices of the county treasurer, auditor, recorder, surveyor and county commissioners; the second floor was planned for the accommodation of the probate judge, clerk and sheriff. The laying of the corner stone was an occasion of great rejoicing and speeches were delivered by Hon. George Bliss and others. The date of building this structure was 1866.
As viewed by a stranger today, this building seems to be but a wing of the court house proper, and from its fine state of preservation one would conclude that it was a part of the original building, notwithstanding the court house is built of stone, while the office building is a compound of brick. stone and iron. This building is still in use ( 1909) and, from its excellent style of building, seems almost like a modern-built structure.
THE COUNTY INFIRMARY.
The citizens of Wayne county have always been a liberal minded and truly charitable people. They have never encouraged idleness, but have ever provided for the poor and unfortunate subjects within its borders. Prior to the adoption of the state constitution of 1852, the paupers of Wayne county were cared for by the various townships, as best they could be by the commissioners and township trustees, but upon the passage of this consti-
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tution, and at the first session of the board of county directors, held July 24, 1852, the Wayne county infirmary was located two miles east of Wooster. The original builder of this institution was Simon Christine, and Dr. S. Pixley, of Wooster, was the first physician in charge. The original building was a three-story structure, the basement being of stone, while the super- structure was of brick. It contains one hundred rooms and the entire build- ing is heated with hot air. Cyrus Senger was appointed the first superin- tendent, and served until 1858, when A. R. Sweeney was appointed, and served many years.
The official report of this county institution for 1876 showed the admis- sion of forty-nine paupers during that year, with ninety-seven other paupers supported by other means, at a total cost of eight thousand and forty-three dollars, or amounting to a cost of seventeen cents per day for each one cared for. Connected with the infirmary, there was originally two hundred and eighty acres of land which helps to sustain the institution.
Of the present standing of this benevolent institution let it be said that the last annual ( 1909) report shows that there were fifty-two inmates- thirty-two men and twenty women. The total value of property, as per invoice just taken, is sixty-nine thousand five hundred dollars. The total ex- penditures for the last fiscial year was nine thousand six hundred and eighty- nine dollars, including a fire escape costing five hundred and sixty-nine dollars.
THE CHILDREN'S HOME.
Not unmindful of the unfortunate children of the county. as early as July, 1881, steps were taken for the securing of land and the erection of proper buildings to care for the children without suitable homes of their own. The county commissioners issued bonds and purchased eighty-two and a fourth acres of valuable land in section 28 of Wayne township, about two miles from the city of Wooster, for which they paid the sum of twelve thou- sand two hundred and fifty dollars to E. Baum, the deed of which was recorded July 7, 1881. There suitable buildings were soon erected and today this humane institution is the pride of Wayne county among those who see the goodness in thus caring for the poor children in their midst. The last quarterly report shows that this home had in its care and safe keeping forty- two children. The total cost of keeping them for this quarter was one thou- sand eight hundred and forty-seven dollars, or forty-three dollars per child for the quarter. W. E. Jarvis is the careful superintendent at this date,
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October, 1909. With plenty of good land to till and plenty of excellent, wholesome food, and proper training, these children will ere long grow to men and women of usefulness and not find their way into vice and crime.
PROPERTY VALUATION OF COUNTY.
The subjoined is a list of the valuations in the various townships and villages and cities in Wayne county, for the year ending August 1, 1908:
Baughman township $1,347,803
Saltcreek township $ 620,797
Chippewa township
1,045,816
Wayne township
1,441,715
Canaan township 870,486
Wooster township
1,037,905
Congress township 836,033 Wooster City
2,550,000
Chester township.
1,050,359
Fredericksburg Village ..
101,691
Clinton township
878,380
Applecreek Village. . 157,122
East Union township.
947,399
Creston Village.
333,828
Franklin township
1,012,507
Mt. Eaton Village. 67,055
Green township.
1,688,347
Dalton Village 184,225
Milton township.
1,325,580
Orrville Town.
370,000
Paint township.
750,004
Marshallville Village. . 129,000
Plain township.
1,003,360
Doylestown Village.
268,000
Sugarcreek township
1,259,577
Grand total of valuation in county
$24,374,153
(9)
CHAPTER VIII.
CIVIL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY.
By Hon. L. R. Critchfield, Sr.
PREFACE.
We read with curiosity the histories with which it has been sought to perpetuate some memory of man. Rollin has condensed the history of the ancient world; Grote has given us the history of Greece; Livy and Gibbon the history of the Roman empire. We read Hallam's Middle Ages, and Guizot's Civilization, Hume and Macaulay, Prescott's Peru and Mexico, the life of Washington, the history of the United States, the modern histories of Asia and Africa; but the world has no history of the masses of mankind. It is only by the mental effort called "faith" that we know that the common people of the world were like ourselves; that they lived and labored, loved, and perished as we do. Even in our own day we celebrate the birth of Washington, the greatness of Jackson; we have non-partisan Lincoln clubs to keep alive the memory of the lamented martyr; but what of the dead, the heroes in common life, the faithful guardians of self government? The age is breaking this immortal solitude. Family reunions are resurrecting the old fathers and mothers; yearly gatherings are extricating ancient virtue from the mould of the wilderness, and a new heart is throbbing loud enough to stir the dust of the pioneers. That we have constructed this magnificent era, is no longer thought by the reflecting man and we are beginning to confess in books the grandeur of the great actors of the past !
Of the very foremost, Wayne county is keeping these records of grati- tude. An elaborate history of Wayne county, some thirty years ago, came from the toilsome genius of Ben Douglas; but the age is advanced in spirit- ual conception, the rude necessities that clothed the early fathers and mothers must give place to that mystic robe that adorned the visits of Gabriel, and amidst the clouds that habited the early settlements, the pure and splendid virtues of the pioneer must blaze like the morning star. As a sign of individ- ual royalty a chain of gold must be thrown about the necks of these heroes of self government! It is to the man of common life, the king of the
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wilderness, the nobleman of the log cabin, and the man that caught their mantle, that the better history commemorates. The New History of Wayne County is the history of men and women and children and their civil and political agency in the formation of government. To this subject, the writer has contributed the following pages. Strictly non-partisan, the words "republican" or "democratic" have reference to form of government, and not to parties; and whatever of party politics intervened in the great work of the fathers, the differences but enlarged that intellectual force necessary for greater objects. Constantly feeling the inclination to record more of the names of the prominent men that honored Wayne county by their patriotism and ability, the limits of the article, and the probable details of the history, were a restriction to the more ample record.
To raise the inference that some of our ideas of individual independence, and American courage, that defies a world in arms, and some principles of government, may have been, possibly, influenced by colonial association with the Indians for two hundred years, and their defiance of a higher civilization, and stubborn retreat before a superior foe, that portion of the article on "Indian Government" is presented. That the Indian was a great barbaric man, intellectual, eloquent, and savage, our early history illustrates.
To give the high origin of the early settlers of Wayne county, their character, their social purity and patriotism, the influences that perfected their vigilance for free institutions, the grandest of all labors that they per- formed in government in the Northwest, the practical and glorious results that have immortalized their early struggles, and their example as followed by their descendants, seemed to the writer an appropriate method of ampli- fying the subject.
The civilization of the new states of the Northwest, and the renown of the pioneers, are attributable to a great ancestry.
The highest and most symmetrical system of government is at once suggested by even a superficial view of the form and character of our na- tional and state constitutions; they involve the perfection of intellectual and moral development and the presence of a sublime spirit. All antiquity was measured in this constitutional system to obtain the finish of a magnificent monument of government with surer foundations and more scientifically sus- taining arches than had been conceived in the history of nations. It was true, and it was also a commonplace, and all Americans knew it, before it was uttered by the lips of Pitt and Burke, that all history might be searched. and the men of the Revolution were the learned and greatest men of the
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world! It would be a prolixity, in eulogy, to name the immortal patriots that gathered about the cradle of liberty, and offered devotion, and gifts of rhetoric, and wisdom, to the young goddess of the Revolution !
There is not only symmetry in form, but logic and power, in the ex- pression and action of the three great divisions of government, federal, state and the reserved power of the people. The general poverty and virtue of the Revolutionary era was the frame about the splendid picture, a picture hung upon the heavens for the world to look at! The spirit of the system an- nounced the sublime expectation of the supreme, commanding force of popular action; and the people, in the marvelous impulses of patriotic sensibility of that era, started the machinery of liberty.
The first of the great concerns of practical government was the unity of empire. Colonial claims extended from the silvery beaches of the Atlantic to beyond the limits of the Elysian fields of Hiawatha. Wrestling with the jealousies of colonial priority to obtain these boundless domains conveyed by the charters of the virgin Queen, and the Charleses, and the Jameses and the Georges, was a not less heroic labor than the bloody diplomacy of acquiring the vast possessions of the Indian nations. The achievement gave to the new republic the hills, and the rivers and the valleys, through whose picturesque gateway civilization passed into the new world of the West.
EDUCATION.
Of education, the opportunities lay at the foundation of the republican superstructure. The public gifts of lands by Congress to the states for the schools, the dedication of the interest from perpetual trust funds arising from the sales of the lands by the constitutions of Ohio of 1802 and 1851 attest the genius of our fathers. The old "School Section Sixteen" is one of the romances of our western civilization, but a romance in real life, for the states of the Union now expend for education twice as much as Great Britain, three times as much as France, five times as much as Germany, eight times as much as Austria, and ten times as much as Italy.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE.
Essential to the preservation of a complex system of free government, the peculiar characteristics of revolutionary purpose were to build up political levels and achieve the altitudes of personal life.
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In our history is a somewhat wonderful, ethical phenomena. The heroic fever of the Revolution consumed colonial caste, and the new man, the great commoner, appeared. Our Revolution developed the brotherhood of man. The magnificent postulate of the commoners of the republic was a political and legal equality of the people; the eternal philosophical truth of the great system of constitutional liberty. Predominant in the colonies, European caste degraded the commonalty by its haughty glance of patronizing benevo- lence. The farmer, the laborer, struggling with poverty, unadorned with imported ornament, unwelcome to the fetes of the aristocrats, contrasted greatly with the ruffled shirts, golden shoe buckles and powdered hair, the stately processions, the wealth, and the courtly pomp and refinement of the lord of the manor; but fashion faded in the great solicitudes of indepen- dence and the revolutionist was born in the wonderful contrasts of social life; and the tradesman, the merchant, the self-assertive professions, the school-man of New England and of the South, the people, arose in voluntary majesty to the comprehension of the value of man. The divine purpose had intercepted the young surveyor of the Alleghanies, and Washington be- came the immortal commoner of every age. He drew to his bosom the young Hamilton, and Greene, and Knox, and Schuyler, and Morris, and other great lieutenants, and the thought of a continent was transformed.
The great commoner thought uncommonly in the philosophy of human rights. Franklin and Jefferson. Otis and Adams, Henry and Morris; then Marshall and Jay and Webster, Wright, Benton and Clay, in a chorus of eloquence, aroused the world to the beauty of free institutions. The great republican commoner is the hero of the great principles of our Magna Charta; the Indian chief gazed long at his footsteps in the Northwest.
THE CONSTITUTION.
The Constitution of the United States arises in a very lofty originality ; above the King John charter extorted by, and for, the barons on a memorable day! The principles of legal government in the states of England were a mosaic variety of common precedents, but only in name a prototype of the great system of the constitution of the United States. Dark medieval shadows confused the legal systems of Briton, Saxon and Norman; nor do Greece or Rome, or the states of its fallen empire, embellish any paragraph of our great constitution. It stands alone in original, solitary grandeur ! There is a delicacy of mental and moral touch in its application and execution,
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and there has grown around this popular system a literature of interpretation, a common law, created by the superintending vigilance of the popular judg- ment.
Statesmanship is that science that can anatomize the intellectual and moral throbs of the great people of America. Of popular progress, the Consti- tution was invested with the intention-Liberty should unseat the king! The magnificent face of men and women of American production should invoke the admiration of the globe. The political literature of presidents, and courts, senates and congresses, the taste, the dramatic power, was to outstrip all traditional civilization !
No human artist can wield such a sword of the spirit as will dissect American influence in the subtle transformations of the world's barbaric in- stincts. Without the presence of these great men and this constitution, Wayne county would be a political myth.
THE FOUNDERS OF GOVERNMENT IN THE NORTHWEST.
Scarcely had the great ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution of the United States electrified the people of the old confederacy with the con- sciousness of national life, than the star of empire took its way to the north- western wilderness. The genius of new states followed the star, and there began to pour into the happy valleys of Ohio, and along the sandy dunes of the northern lakes, the unique and splendid thinkers of the revolution. Uprising like an aurora upon the summits of the Alleghanies appeared the mighty school master, and the teaching clergyman, the artist, the surveyor, the hero, the soldier from the Indian frontier, the statesman from the con- federate congress, the legislator, the constitution maker, the physician, the lawyer, the laborer; and likewise there came the mother of heroic offspring; all cutting their way through roadless forests, rafting the streams, and fixing their tents in nature's solitude. Not only of men and women,-it was the im- migration of principles, the spiritual light of a new empire was marching with them, and the great flashing eye of civilization confronted the savage and drove him back among the shadows of the forest. Forms of govern- ment began to methodize the inorganic state; religion, too, spread her divine wings over the solitude and intoned her songs with the birds of the woods; an exceptional race was seen whose intellectual face and beaming eyes soon mingled their illumination with the brilliant scenes of the northwestern morning! The beautiful face of the American, the inviolability of virtue, were commencing their enchantment, but amidst the indescribable dangers
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that lurked in savage life. The Revolutionary war had not ceased, but con- tinued in dangerous hostility for nearly thirty years. Obliged by the treaty of 1783 to deliver up the western posts, Great Britain, under pretext of American violation of the treaty, had refused, and had British troops still in the posts in 1812; its Indian allies were incited to deeds of blood; canoes of savages were on the rivers; Indians traversed the county; their wigwams were in the woods; predatory bands murdered the inhabitants; Tecumseh had organized the Indian nations ; battles were fought; Indian revenge glutted its savagery as it slowly retreated; Indian titles were purchased, and safety secured for our people only long after the treaty of peace with Great Britain in 1815, and after British power was extinguished at the battle of New Orleans. Attracted to the territory of the Northwest, as the gift of Virginia to the general government, many of the early settlers of Wayne county were from that noble state, possessed of the sublime composure, determined will and personal courage that were a part of the education of the southern man and woman, and in the danger about their new homes, and in the war of 1812, this southern manhood and womanhood fearlessly met and conquered, not for a day, but for years, the difficulties of primeval nature. From Maryland were many others, and from every eastern and middle state came the founders of government. Amidst this splendid noontide of Wayne county, now embellished by art and education, we can truly behold the great men and women and the great crisis of 1796. A future of prophecy! The revelation of the Constitution of the United States was brooding over the wilderness; only probabilities, and the visionary beauty of the manhood and womanhood of the West, was in its embrace. Angels were fluttering among the trees! Study has been given to these great men !
Noted in Roman history is Myron's celebrated statue of the heifer, as being so fine a manifestation of sculpture that the butchers of the stalls about the Forum had difficulty in preventing their cattle from circling around and around the statue, to catch her marbled breath and the lambent light of her crystalline eye. So the impulses of the writer upon a higher plane and to a nobler object, circle around and around these statues of the pioneers that history has sculptured into divine expression.
That the ancients made demigods of their heroes; that the Chinese worship their ancestors; that the Roman soldier was the conqueror of the world, bearing the urn that contained the ashes of his father,-is it a wonder ? The superstition of loving our fathers is an hereditary virtue. Interpreta- tion of fine principles and heroic deeds, is character. Of our heritage, the sublimest possession is the character of the pioneers of government. Liberty
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was then only a beautiful song, an ecstacy, a hope, an ideal goddess, an eagle upon her hand with wings of gold; our ancestors threw the stars about her divine form. The lion slumbering in the revolutionary heart was ready to spring upon the world. He might have had his huge limbs and lofty head bound down by the multiplied webs of ancient systems; our powers might have become atrophied by disuse; they were made glorious. It was a magnificent drama of an early world!
On occasion of a pioneer picnic several years ago, at Highland park, my remarks were directed to the subject of the "Pioneer Mothers," and the gratification of the audience was a eulogy upon that noble character of the early founders of our institutions. Hopeful, patient, alert, prophetic, using the rifle, fearless, largely anxious in daily ministrations, fierce as a female lion over her young, the pioneer mother was advancing civilization, and erecting that imperishable monument that will never cease to proclaim the virtue and glory of our country !
Such was the sublime character of the founders of the first of new states ; a new nation covered with wounds, and pulsating with the blood of liberty behind them; an uncreated empire of untold magnificence before them. With prudent and reflective energy we commenced our great career. It was a 'watchful and wary ingress into dangers and savage life; the meas- ured and steady progress of law, amidst the claws of the bear and the jealous tomahawk of the Indian.
No settlement had been made in this new domain until April, 1788, when forty-six immigrants arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum river. No constituted authority being there, Return Jonathan Meigs drew up a code of rules, on a sheet of foolscap, and tacked them to a large oak tree. Fol- lowing up the Muskingum and its tributaries, immigration made settle- ments towards the north; but it was not until 1806 that William Larwill, and in 1807 Joseph and John Larwill, his brothers, settled in Wayne county, John Bever being then engaged in surveying the sections of the county. The interminable exodus from the East then flowed, and formed the great popula- tion of the Northwest!
The interesting and significant fact is that law was tacked up on an oak! It was to be an empire of law !
INDIAN GOVERNMENT.
With nations of Indians inhabiting the undefined territory of the old colonies, the Constitution of the United States became a comprehensive menace to aboriginal government. As a very ancient people they met Colum-
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